Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin has said it is time for Solaris to simply move out of the way and yield the future to Linux. 'The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows. It is not Unix or Solaris,' he claims, contending that Sun's strength in long-lifecycle apps is giving way to Linux, as evidenced by the rise of Web apps, where Linux holds a decided advantage, Zemlin claims. With capabilities such as ZFS and DTrace, Sun is trying to compete based on minor features, he says. 'That's literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground.'

Hum, obviously you do not know what bankruptcy is... SUN's revenue is flat, that is indeed a problem.

Their revenue is flat most quarters, but shows a pretty distinct decline overall while their costs are still too high.

But they have plenty of cash, thus they are pretty f*cking far from "bankrupcy."

Most of that cash is going on maintaining their costs and the things that eat money in their business, namely maintenance of Solaris and SPARC which are simply not growing markets. When you're pumping money into costs which do not turn into growth and an increase in revenue, and the revenue from those costs continues to decline steadily as well, you have a problem.

SUN is a $14 billion company, and red hat is what 300 or 400 million tops?

Correction. They think they are still a $14 billion company from the nineties when they could support that by selling exceptionally expensive software, hardware and support to people, and where the dot com boom companies then lapped that up. Those days are over.

In fact SUN had a larger revenue that all the linux companies (and no, IBM nor Oracle are not Linux-only companies) combined.

That revenue is all coming from maintenance of existing Solaris and SPARC systems, and is declining at a fairly steady rate that Sun can do nothing about.

Until Linux has a file system comparable to ZFS, a facility even remotely close to DTrace, proper kernel threads, stable interfaces, the pervasive hot plugging capacities of Solaris, etc... then we will talk.

Unfortunately, very, very, very few people actually care about that stuff (the stuff that exists, at any rate), and it's a niche market of features as Zemlin was trying to say. When a Linux distributor adds comparable features then people will definitely like it, but it's not going to make people rush out and switch distributors tomorrow.

.....when it comes to programming anything low level (anyone writing a driver or anything close to the kernel knows what I am talking about)... I am about done with Linux.

While I won't reply to the rest of that because it is unsubstantiated bumf, I will say that it would be nice if Sun actually had some drivers ;-).

Give me 3rd party apps

Solaris has very few third party apps that run well on it, let alone all the open source ones people have tried to get working for years. People complain about application support within Linux systems, and software installation on Solaris systems is still a headbanging experience with no package management.

CUDA, and the intel compiler suite for solaris and will be a happy man.

Unless you are using a GNU toolchain, or at least a compatible one, you are in for a world of hurt if you want to get any open source applications running on there. You'll need a lot of caffeine and Red Bull ;-).

And yes, I just spent 4 days to implement a hack that allows me to get a specific trace of performance counters for a benchmark under linux (for a paper). The same process took literally minutes with dtrace.

That's a great anecdote that you've pulled out of thin air to meet a specific task, but that's not a task of the vast majority I'm afraid.

never mind the fact that a apt-get update did bring a new library version that somehow borked the hack I had got working at some point...

It would be nice if Solaris had apt-get, or indeed, any package management at all.